Not bothered by vestiges of fame

It’s eight years since Jose Gonzalez made a splash with the ‘falling colours’ song, writes Ed Power

JOSE Gonzalez is unflappable. It’s eight years since the singer-songwriter’s last solo album. After so long a lay-off, many performers would be creased-up with anxiety. Had his audience hung around? Would anyone care that he had returned to the highly finessed acoustic pop with which he had established his reputation in the mid-2000s. Gonzalez is a realist.

Still, the singer, now 36, is sincere when he says jitters aren’t an issue. He has just just released a new collection of plaintive dirges, Vestiges and Claws, and seems not in the least anxious as to how it will be received. If people still want to hear what he is up to, well and good. If not, then there is little he can do to remedy the situation. He is going to write the songs he is going to write, regardless.

“It’s funny — even at home in Sweden, there are journalists who have never heard of me,” says Gonzalez, who had enormous success with his cover of ‘Heartbeats’, by fellow Swedes, The Knife, in 2006 (you might recall that it soundtracked the ‘falling colours’ advert for the Sony Bravia television).

“What I’ve learned is that the media cycle moves quickly and you can be forgotten. That’s okay — I don’t get recognised much anyway. People tend not to know me. They know my music. Maybe they hear ‘Heartbeats’ or ‘Crosses’ on the radio and wonder who it is. Or, perhaps, a friend has told them about me. I’m fine being one of those artists people discover by accident,” he says.

Gonzalez enjoyed his stint in the limelight. Still, it was never his natural environment. Thus, he was not exactly aghast when the attentions of the mainstream were directed elsewhere. He shrugs: that’s how it goes in the music business.

“There were two peaks — in Sweden, in 2003, and internationally, in 2005, 2006. ‘Heartbeats’ got so big worldwide that I was not able to go back and work on my second album It was this huge wave I had no choice but follow. It took me to many , many places.”

Nonetheless, life as a solo artist can be lonely. Which is why, in 2009, he put his solo career on hold and retreated to what he has always regarded as his ‘day job’, his indie band, Junip.

“After my umpteenth world tour, I was done,” he says. “It was time for a switch, musically. It was nice to get into my own band. I enjoy the company. That is why, for my new tour, I’m going taking four musicians on the road. I like the group mentality. It makes life on tour more fun,” he says. Gonzalez grew up Gothenburg, the son of Argentinian immigrants. His parents were student activists forced to flee the old country after the military coup of the late 1970s.

Fearing their imminent arrest, they had sought asylum at the first embassy they could find in Buenos Aires. It happened to Sweden’s.

Gonzalez has always felt at home in Sweden. Gothenburg is an extremely multi-cultural city and his parents quickly assimilated. When he was a child, they listened to Latin American music a great deal; this, Gonzalez says, impacted on his unique style of play, incorporating the difficult-to-master 12-string nylon guitar.

Being a virtuoso did not mean songs flowed any more quickly than for anyone else.

Gonzalez has, in the past, spoken frankly about the torture of songwriting. He would spend weeks, months, labouring on a single piece — sometimes to the point where he suspected his sanity was in jeopardy.

Strangely, the usual soul-searching did not attend the new LP. “I’ve picked up a few tricks,” he says. “If you count Junip, this is my fifth album. You learn along the way.

“I know when I am able to write, when I’m not. I don’t have optimistic time-frames. I used to be a bit naive about how long the process would take. I would get frustrated, bang my head. That no longer happens,” he says.

Vestiges and Claws is out now